Here is a part of LW history that may be relevant to the question of money and sponsors: the Less Wrong website you see is, from a technical perspective, already a third version.
The first version was Overcoming Bias, a shared blog of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which started in 2006. Being just two guys’ personal WordPress blog, I assume the costs were negligible.
The second version was Less Wrong implemented with a clone of Reddit code in 2009, which started with importing the existing Eliezer’s articles. The initial software was free, but required some maintenance and extra functionality, which was provided by TrikeApps. TrikeApps is a company owned by Less Wrong user matt.
The third version that you see now, with a complete rewrite of code, was actually made only a few years ago. I couldn’t quickly find the exact year, but not sooner than 2017. This was the first version that was actually quite expensive to develop.
In other words, before Less Wrong started needing serious money to exist as a website, it already had more than 10 years of history. So there is a strong momentum. The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome. (The people who didn’t like the historical Less Wrong would probably not donate money to keep it alive.) The fans of Less Wrong, as a whole, are sufficiently rich to keep the website alive.
PS: You are taking this too seriously; probably more seriously than most users here. There is no need to overthink it. If you have an idea for a nice article, write it. If you don’t, just reading and commenting is perfectly okay.
The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome.
I think a better historical perspective would be that they liked was LessWrong was in it’s first years of existing and felt that LessWrong declined and that there was a potential to bring it back to it’s old glory and make it even beter.
I feel like this branch of the discussion might be related to Dunbar’s Number? Either for total members or for active participants. Is there any data for number of participants over time and system versions?
However I also feel like Dunbar’s Number is probably different for different people. Social hubs have large numbers of personal friends, whereas I feel overwhelmed by any group of 150. My personal Dunbar’s Number might be around 15?
Your summary seems correct.
Here is a part of LW history that may be relevant to the question of money and sponsors: the Less Wrong website you see is, from a technical perspective, already a third version.
The first version was Overcoming Bias, a shared blog of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which started in 2006. Being just two guys’ personal WordPress blog, I assume the costs were negligible.
The second version was Less Wrong implemented with a clone of Reddit code in 2009, which started with importing the existing Eliezer’s articles. The initial software was free, but required some maintenance and extra functionality, which was provided by TrikeApps. TrikeApps is a company owned by Less Wrong user matt.
The third version that you see now, with a complete rewrite of code, was actually made only a few years ago. I couldn’t quickly find the exact year, but not sooner than 2017. This was the first version that was actually quite expensive to develop.
In other words, before Less Wrong started needing serious money to exist as a website, it already had more than 10 years of history. So there is a strong momentum. The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome. (The people who didn’t like the historical Less Wrong would probably not donate money to keep it alive.) The fans of Less Wrong, as a whole, are sufficiently rich to keep the website alive.
PS: You are taking this too seriously; probably more seriously than most users here. There is no need to overthink it. If you have an idea for a nice article, write it. If you don’t, just reading and commenting is perfectly okay.
I think a better historical perspective would be that they liked was LessWrong was in it’s first years of existing and felt that LessWrong declined and that there was a potential to bring it back to it’s old glory and make it even beter.
I feel like this branch of the discussion might be related to Dunbar’s Number? Either for total members or for active participants. Is there any data for number of participants over time and system versions?
However I also feel like Dunbar’s Number is probably different for different people. Social hubs have large numbers of personal friends, whereas I feel overwhelmed by any group of 150. My personal Dunbar’s Number might be around 15?
I don’t think the history here is about Dunbar’s number.